Homogenised limit analysis of masonry walls : part II : structural examples

Abstract

The homogenised failure surfaces obtained through the simple micro-mechanical model developed in the first part of the paper are here used for the analysis of in-plane loaded masonry walls. Both upper and lower bound homogenised limit analyses are employed for treating meaningful structural cases, namely a deep beam and a set of shear walls. Detailed comparisons between the experimental data and numerical results obtained using both a heterogeneous and a homogenised approach are also presented. The examples show the efficiency of the homogenised technique with respect to: 1) accuracy of the results; 2) reduced number of finite elements required; 3) independence of the mesh, at a structural level, from the actual texture of masonry. A final example on a large scale wall is presented with the aim to show an engineering application of the proposed approach.